Interview

We are not a muse

She's the unmistakably ethereal face in husband John Currin's paintings, but Rachel Feinstein is an artist in her own right. On the eve of Currin's two major London shows, Jessica Berens talks to New York's most celebrated art couple about fame, sexism and the ups and downs of a creative marriage

It is tempting to imagine that Rachel Feinstein must have the biggest bosoms in the entire world, married, as she is, to John Currin, an artist whose reputation was launched by unashamed portraits of unfeasibly cantilevered women. Certainly, he must be the only fine artist to have received a review in Juggs, the exuberant porno magazine dedicated to all things hooter.

Describing Currin's 1998 show in New York, the Juggs critic noted the portrayals of DD ladies bursting out of their T-shirts, and concluded that this opus was 'a mind-blowing art experience...'

Currin's ungainly freaks served to propel him in what Juggs accurately described as the 'fancy pants artworld' - stirring, and in a way symbolising the schizoid post-fem discourse that was around in the mid- to late-90s. It was a complex cross currency, you might recall, full of Paglia and Guerrilla Girls and questions about motivation and reality.

The Village Voice, always the vanguard in such things, has long been on and off Currin's back, leading a primary attack with the order that all good Americans boycott his sexist stuff. 'That got me attention,' he notes now. 'I should have sent a thank-you note.' Since then, he has been credited with spearheading a welcome return to figurative painting, and for a technical approach that draws from the Renaissance masters to make pictures that are 'absolutely magnetic'.

Currin is a fine painter, and a thoughtful one, addressing many more ideas than mundane sex-shock. 'I could show any moral or sexual perversion and people will say, "Yeah yeah, it's been done,"' he observes. 'Nowadays, I think bad drawing is the only thing that shocks people, especially as photographs take over consciousness of what realness is."

He is fully aware of the dangers of 'one scandal wonder', and though he enjoys provocation, particularly when played out against a backdrop of insoluble contradictions, his narrative content has moved on, through idealised nudes in twisted poses to funny and touching portraits of old people, to two naked fishermen in a boat.

His portraits are of characters that he has made up, doing what a novelist does, taking an idea from a newspaper photograph and building the personality around them, often giving them the expressions of women in 50s ads for domestic appliances - that rictus leer that could hide simmering resentment or the genuine joy of
consumerist glee.

The paintings are enigmatic, but always entertaining, drawing, as they do, on
the kitsch tenets of mainstream Americana. Currin conveys cartoony ideas and eery oddballs to make points about the ironies of middle-class unhappiness. Accessible and therefore commercial, he is now one of America 's collectables.

This month, in London, he is honoured with a retrospective show at the Serpentine Gallery, and new pictures on sale contemporaneously at Sadie Coles's gallery.

'How much are they, then?' I ask. He looks genuinely embarrassed. There is
a lot of oohing and aahing and admitting it's a lot. 'I think they're around $100,000, but you'll have to check with Sadie.'

His wife appears in many of his paintings, sometimes as an actual face, often as an atmospheric embodiment, sometimes because the paid model has gone off on holiday and someone is needed to lie on the table. When he gives lectures, Currin likes to entertain students with The Wizard -
a picture showing a huge blonde meekly allowing her peachy breasts to be fondled by a man wearing what appears to be eye shadow and a pair of black latex gloves. 'This is when I first met Rachel,' he explains.

So. Rachel then. Mrs Currin. The Muse. Big bra, or what? Course not. If art was as simple as that, Picasso's mistress would have had one eye and three legs. Rachel, also an artist - a sculptor, in fact - is 5ft 9in, blonde, green-eyed and evenly proportioned, though distorted at the moment due to the fact that she is seven months pregnant.

They live in a ground-floor apartment
on Varick Street, downtown Manhattan, near Canal and around the corner from
an Asian street where Latino teenagers scrabble to buy the latest $20 fake Prada handbag. You have to tap on the window
to gain entrance, and avoid stepping on
the tiny black Affenpinscher which yaps and then hides under a chair. There are paintings by Sean Landers and George Condo, a striped wallpaper, a lime-green wall and a shiny period dining-room table surrounded by thrift-store chairs.

The morning we met, John was a bit baity, having remained awake all night obsessing about the hand that he is trying to perfect on one of his paintings while
also feeling slightly ashamed that, despite his wife's pregnancy, 'It's still all about
me.' He becomes genuinely irritated at
the mention of Jennifer Lopez, and, later Matthew Barney, the artist husband of Björk. 'Please,' he says. 'I want to have
a Barney-free day.'

He is an intense person with eyes that see everything, a sense of humour and the kind of obsession with detail that often arrives with high degrees of clinical anxiety. His joy is painting, talking about painting, thinking about painting. He is capable of talking for 10 minutes about a single brush stroke on one of his pictures, a single brush stroke that still interests him and still makes him happy and can be compared to other brush strokes on other paintings that also make him happy. And then, suddenly, he will jump up and pretend to be in the chorus line of Pennies from Heaven in order to demonstrate that it is possible to pretend to be out of control while actually being in control. And that, too, is like painting.

His wife gives him drinks and we try to find a suitable place near the air-conditioning, then move again, to the dining table, worrying slightly about glass marks and Rachel lounging pregnantly over
two chairs, feet up.

An oval face presents a full mouth, painted red, from which there arrives quite a lot of noise. She is not the shark-faced model of current fashion, but a woman made attractive by her personality, which is enthusiastic and quite eccentric. There
is a lot of baby-talk to the little dog, Chewy, for instance, who gets carried about the downtown streets in a handbag. 'I was a very funny-looking person till I was 16,' she says.

Now she has boho dash and puts herself together as she pleases. People want to photograph her; together, husband and wife are seen as 'happening' on the social scene of the art world, going to parties and generally being in demand. This, curiously, has been to her disadvantage.

'The New York art world is very protective of itself,' she says. 'They don't like it when something is not in an art magazine. Dealers and collectors told me I shouldn't have been in Vogue. They feel that they have to defend you because you were photographed at some party, so it means
you are not a great artist...'

Her husband agrees. 'I hate this Protestant attitude of the New York art world, where you are not allowed to have fun. Be serious... be self-loathing... don't drink alcohol... they are attacking her for being a woman, for doing what she enjoys.'

'In the New York art world,' says Rachel, warming up now, 'If you are a black artist you have to think about the fact that you are a black artist every single second, if you are a female artist you have to think about being female and making work because you are a female artist; but I grew up in
a home where the only difference between men and women was medical.

'John was photographed by GQ and he wasn't attacked for that. If he wants to wear sandals he is not going to think people are going to look at the sandals and think that means something. I don't think about how to portray myself or how to project myself as a female artist and I refuse to change the way I walk out of the house every day because
I have to think of others people's opinions.'

'The real sexism,' says John, 'is that even if I am a balding middle-aged guy, if I pull something off in my art it will still be exciting. Losing my youth will be a nuisance
but it will not be a tragedy. Women do not have that access. In the art world, or any world, they hate it if you happen to be
pretty and then attack you when your looks start to leave you...'

They met in a Manhattan art gallery nine years ago. She was 23 he was 32. She had made a 12ft x 12ft 'gingerbread' house out of styrofoam and slept in it under a pink duvet. 'So you sort of peeked in.'

He arrived because a friend had insisted that they meet - telling both of them
that Rachel looked like the girl that kept reappearing in his paintings. He was slightly depressed at the time. 'I wanted to be a rich, famous artist and I wasn't.

I wanted to be in love with a wonderful woman and I wasn't. So I had decided to give up and be promiscuous.'

At first, Rachel was uninterested in the idea of this blind date. 'I had always been single,' she says. 'And the suggestion that I pose for someone offended me. I was trying to do my own art and I was trying to act like this aggressive sexual feminist type of artist which I really am not, but that was the period in the art world.'

Rachel only wore white, with shaved eyebrows, platinum hair and cherry lips. Very rock'n'roll, she recalls. 'A white Goth,' he adds, remembering how extraordinary she looked in a neon light. 'She was very very pretty... and very weird.'

He arrived at the gallery wearing trousers covered with paint. 'You didn't change!' she tells him. 'I remember thinking that.' 'Whatever I wore, I am sure it was calculated,' he says. 'As the pretext of meeting her was that I was going to paint her, then that was the message. I can guarantee it would not have been my actual painting clothes, but ones that I only painted in occasionally, nice-looking paint clothes with the colours right and everything.'

She saw him, walked up to him, planted a cherry-rid kiss on his face, wiped the lipstick off it, and asked him out. He said he had other plans. It seemed to her that he literally ran out of the gallery, but he phoned her three days later and asked if she'd like to come and see his paintings. So she did, only she placed the chair with her back to them, not looking at his work at all. 'I just wanted to talk to him,' she says. 'That was all I was interested in at the time.'

Six months later, 'insanely in love', they were living together and he persuaded her to grow her eyebrows back in. Then he began to paint her, though it was difficult to adjust at first. He was happy for the first time in his life and he had never painted as a happy person. He didn't quite know what to do with himself. The late 90s saw pictures in which Rachel's becomes an ideal of ethereal purity, always good, always demure, never quite as dominant as she is in reality.

'I find the idea of a muse kinda corny,' he says. 'I think of the poet with a nude ghost in a Poussin picture. But when I met Rachel I felt that I could connect with some principles that moved my art along, that
I had some freedom from the petty things in my own personality.'

The men of his earlier paintings are never heroic or sexy; they are always bearded and sad and wearing unattractive apparel, reflecting, perhaps, the artist's own feelings of inadequacy, frustration and confusion. These days, though, being with one woman, he is less interested in others, less fascinated, less inclined to use women as a template on to which any fantasy may be painted, and this makes him, he thinks, if anything, 'more sexist now'.

They are a team. Bossing each other about, arguing about each other's art, occasionally having a fight so big that neither of them knows what it is about, and looking forward to the birth of their baby son, for whom they currently have 12 names.

I wonder if Rachel worries that a child will obstruct the output of her work.

'I have thought about that a lot. If you look at Eva Hesse and all these great female artists, all of them are childless. I have thought it through as much as I can, but
I always do everything I wanna do and think about it later. I would rather not overthink and then not do it. Anyway, if I have a 12-hour day in the studio I will spend 10 hours sitting on the couch wondering how to begin. When I had to work in the bar, and had less time, I got much more done in the studio. That's why I think having
a child might be good for me.'

'There is not enough history of women making art,' her husband adds. 'We don't know what the ideal state is. The "lone wolf" heroism that men gravitate toward
is not necessarily the one that creates the best female artist.'

They come from different backgrounds. She, the daughter of a dermatologist from Miami, was availed of no culture in a place where 'They only got a museum two years ago.' She took drawing lessons from a woman in Biscayne Bay, who taught her from the book Drawing on the Right Hand Side of the Brain. 'We did a page every week.' Her father told her that art was no way to make a living, but she went to New York's Columbia University anyway.

John arrived from academia. His father is a physics professor at the State University of New York; his mother is a piano teacher. There were violin lessons and painting lessons, then Yale.

'His family are incredibly cultural,' says Rachel. 'You go to his house and there are intellectual conversations and some incredible old recording of Schubert. My family is always complete chaos with the parents screeching and it is all about food.'

They work side by side in studios located on west 15th street, an area which used to be meat-packing and transvestites and is now Stella McCartney and Gucci sneakers.

John's new paintings are on his studio wall, nearly ready, but not quite. There is the troublesome hand in the middle of
a big bizarre picture of three women, all Rachel-ish, all enjoying an extraordinary feast of turkey. A preparation drawing of masterly skill and great beauty shows a profile of her, older and distorted, but somehow possessing the spirit that she might have in the wisdom and silence of age.

The paintings can take months to complete. 'It will get really good then I wreck it, then I do it again, then it gets mediocre, then I scale the whole thing down but you can only just see it, then I will pick it up again and it gets good...'

'He changes things that were perfectly fine the first time,' says his wife, who is the first to admit that she knew little about painting until she met her husband, who is known for being unusually well informed in a milieu full of people who think that art history begins with Andy Warhol.

John is as critical of Rachel as Rachel is of him, telling her recently that the life-sized crucifix she was making was badly constructed and dangerous.

'It will fall,' he predicted, and it did, narrowly missing her head.

'I get very sour grapes when he is right,' she says.

Her studio is full of pieces of wood, a picture of Barbara Cartland painted on to
a mirror, glossy magazines and pregnancy books. A copy of Flash Art, on which her work is the cover, reveals that she has achieved some success in her own right,
as does her cuttings book, which shows Satinstein, a huge gilt bridge that she completed as a commission for Sotheby's, to the tune of $100,000.

She tells me that when she and John met they were both 'well-formed individuals - both egomaniacs', and she is, perhaps, protected by this. In the end he is the elder, the teacher, the chief money-maker, the artist. She is the wife, the inspiration, the collaborator, playing a part that has long been played around the drama of art men. One thinks of Rodin's Camille, who died mad and alone; Tintoretto's daughter, Marietta Robusti, a fine painter re-cycled in portraits as a tubercular icon; Francoise Gilot, punched by her father when she said she was going to be an artist and live with Picasso... one thinks of all the supine victims splayed out on the long couch of art history. It is tricky territory, loving the art man. Now as much as then.

'I am an enabler for John,' says Rachel. 'I am almost like his bodyguard. I will
try to accommodate the everyday life so that he can paint. I am the person who allows him to do what he really wants to do. It makes my life easier when he is happy.

But every once in a while I will think, "Ooh, what about me? I'm the artist, too." Or people will say, "Don't you feel bad that you
are getting a lot of attention because of him?" And I say, "You know what? I'm not going to overthink it."'

· New work by John Currin is at Sadie Coles HQ, 35 Heddon Street, London W1 (020 7434 2227) from 6 September to 4 October. There is also a retrospective of his work at the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 (020 7402 6075) from 9 September to 2 November.

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About this article

Jessica Berens talks to John Currin and Rachel Feinstein

This article appeared in the Observer
on Saturday 30 August 2003.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 18.49 EDT on Sunday 31 August 2003.
It was first published at 18.49 EDT on Saturday 30 August 2003.